The text
of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday, Ishval audio 32.

Track 1

We are
going to talk about the true, the good and the beautiful in relation
to the three parts of the man. There is quite a lot of literature
about, the true, the good and the beautiful in the last two and a
half thousand years but there is very little adequate definition of
the relation between them.

If
we relate them to the three parts of the human being, the head, chest
and the tummy then we can place the
true in the head, the beautiful in the chest, do I need to write it
all, no, and the good in the tum. Now we will see why we place them
in this position. When you talk about true, you are making an
assessment about non-deviation. If you say that is a true triangle we
mean that it is not bent in such a way that you can’t recognise it
to be a triangle. If you say that line is truly straight, you mean it
does not wobble, it doesn’t divert from its direction. Now the
etymology of true is interesting because you can see that TR implies
a turning process and the essence of truth is the circle drawn from a
centre with a pair of compasses. A true circle is a circle in which
your compasses are not ordinary education authorities school issue,
which wobble about and are very loose in the joint so that when you
start to strike the circle, the radius extends and you might get a
circle that looks a bit like this. Supposing I get my compass and
start to turn and the legs of the compass begin to widen and it goes
like that, and I see that it is wrong so I bring them in again and go
like that and then join up. Now school issue compasses for kids
actually do that kind of thing. Do you remember them? Funny little
brass things, they occasionally come on the second hand market, five
pence a gross. They are very good for filing down to make tools with.

To make a
real circle, a true circle, a perfect circle, you must have an
absolutely rigid pair of compasses, and to get a rigid anything costs
money. Rather funny that isn’t it? Rigidity is an essential of
truth. We will see why there are certain kinds of philosophers who
dislike truth intensely in this sense because if the true is the
undeviating, the rigid, then it appears that the living process which
full of deviations, flexibilities, adjustments and compromises cannot
be true in this sense.

Track 2

If we go
back a little, to consider our trine, the true, the true, imagine
this circle is perfect. I haven’t got my rigid compass with me so I
did an approximation to it free hand and the ink in this thing is
bearing, under the exposure to the air it tends to dry, it is a bit
thick, a bit wobbly and so on. Luckily I have an eyeball more or less
approximating in a section through it to a circle, so I can draw a
circle by thinking of my eyeball and going round it. And for all
general usages it is not bad to do that way. Remember you have an
eyeball and roll it and follow the rolling with your pen you will get
an approximate circle. Now, if we say this circle might have been
called rota long ago, a wheel, we can see how this TR got into the
word ‘true.’ TRU, TRU, the O and the U are the same letter
originally so that when we talk about the true we are talking about
the rotating and we are saying that the character of this rotation is
that it maintains the same length of radius, and the more accurately
it maintains that same length of radius, the more true will be the
circle.

Now we
are not to think, that when we are talking about a circle in this way
that is it of interest only to geometricians, because the concept of
the true has really bugged philosophers for a very, very long time.
We go back three thousand years and we find human thinkers asking
what is true, and then they ask what is real, and then they ask is
the true the real, is the real, really true. And there is very little
definition in profane philosophy about what this truth is. Now,
supposing we say that when you rotate your compass you enclose an
area and we will say it has been in-closed, in-cluded, and the part
outside it has been ex-cluded, the cluded part meaning closed, then a
circle simultaneously includes and excludes space. It

includes
a finite amount of space and it excludes an infinite amount of space,
which is rather funny because most people think that when you divide
something you divide it into halves but in this case the halves are
very, very unequal. The internal half, the included is finite and the
external half is infinite. Now this is very, very important for
philosophy and for life to recognise this because when we come to
examine what we call a form, form is a Latin word, forma, form
means exactly the same thing as rota and circle, sphere and so on,
and it implies a binding line, a ligature or an encapsulated zone, an
included, in-closed and an excluded, out-closed. The Anglo Saxon for
form is shape, and the Greek for that same thing would be eidos,
whence we get our word ‘idea.’ So all those are synonyms. An
idea, eidos, shape form, rota, the circle, the sphere, the true, are
all synonyms. And we see how important this is when we come to think
because when we think, we encapsulate forms, shapes of experiences,
in idea.

If I look
at the lights in the room, close my eyes and reproduce them I have an
idea of a light in the room and the idea in my mind if it is derived
from looking in focus at a lamp, is lighte the lamp that I saw
outside. So the external world, the excluded, the lamp, and my
internal world, inside my skin surface have a correspondence. There
is a light outside me, that is, outside this body, and there is
another light, a mental light, inside me, because when I look at the
lamp over there and close my eyes, I can still see the same shape. I
can actually see it to the same intensity. When it is that intense on
the inside as it is on the outside we call it an eidetic. An eidetic
form, a form that is sharply clear as if we were looking at the
actual external situation.

Track 3

Now, you
might think that is not so terribly important for human sanity but it
is, because if all your ideas on the inside of your skin are true
ideas in correspondence with the external forms that you see, then
you are sane and you have a remarkable power of adjustment to the
external world if your internal world is actually is furnished with
shapes, colours, forms and so on, as it is outside. The inner and
outer being correspondent, the being is then true. When the inner,
says one of the apocryphal gospels, shall be as the outer, when the
above shall be as the below, when the microcosm shall be as the
macrocosm, then heaven is attained. That is to say, heaven equals the
balance of power, but if I have inside my skin surface an idea a
shape, a form, an image, correspondent with one on the outside then,
if I understand this image, I can adjust to the external world in
terms of the image. So if I can adjust this thing in my hand is a
kind of writing instrument and that if it hasn’t dried up, it will
make a mark, and if I wish to make a mark, I can make a mark. If I
understand what it means to be drawing a line at right angles, I can
draw a line at right angles. If I understand what it means to bisect
an angle then I can bisect an angle thus. In other words, if I have
an idea inside my skin, for every element in the external world and I
understand the nature of this idea, I understand the nature of the
external form correspondent with it, then I can do manipulations
inside my skin with the ideas. And these manipulations, if they are
truly correspondent with the external forms of the world, will allow
me to do correspondent actions in the world. They will only allow me
to do this providing my ideas are true. If I say I will now draw a
triangle, there is a triangle, in drawing that triangle I recognise
its three-sidedness, and if I agree to use the term three-sided form
equals triangle, then, if I wish to draw a triangle I can draw it.
And if I wish to draw another kind of triangle called right-angled,
and I draw a right angle and then complete the other side, I draw
another kind of triangle, right angled triangle and in the process I
can adjust to things in the world that are like it. So If I wanted to
go out to a shop and buy a right angle triangle and I hadn’t time
to buy one, I would say to David, who has more time than I have, he
has a lot more time than I have, then I would say, “Would you mind
going out and getting me a right angled triangle,” and he would
know what I meant wouldn’t you David? He knows what I mean. On the
other hand, if I said go out and get me an isosceles triangle he
would go out and get one of those.

Providing we have the same forms in our minds and the same terms in
out minds we can do another interesting thing, we can cooperate in
the external world using manipulations of the inner world. We can do
things inside our minds and we can make relationships in the mind and
discuss them in the mind, and agree to divide the labours and then we
can go in two opposite directions and meet at the mystical hour of
eleven o’clock and there do some tremendously important deeds
because we have truly seen it in our minds and our mental elements
are correspondent with those in the material, physical, external
world. So the true is tremendously important.

Track 4

Now, if
there were merely truth there would be total rigidity in the world.
Now you probably all are now sufficiently familiar with this idea of
the hexon. A circle which we make and we take the compass and we
shift it from the centre to the periphery and we draw another circle
like that. And then we shift the compass
foot to there and we draw another one like this, and we draw another
one like this, and we draw another one like this, and we draw
another. You see I am performing the same operation, so once I have
understood the operation that I simply move the compass round to the
next intersection point I can draw such a pattern. But also, if I
understand it thoroughly, I can see to draw another circle like this,
and another one like this and I can go wandering round the whole
process and I can cover this piece of sheeting, Perspex, with this
pattern. Now the interesting thing about this pattern is that when
truly drawn with an accurately-made pair of compasses, rigid, it will
cover the paper with identical forms and they will be rigidly true,
they will be unalterably circles and they will have the same radius
and I could, given infinite time, spread out and keep drawing these
circles everywhere. And if I had covered infinite space with those
circles then I would have covered infinite space with truth. There is
form, there is shape, unalterable, rigid, so that I could then make a
rule; if there is a circle anywhere in space, then that circle has
been crossed by six other circles and there will be, apparently an
inner form of a six-petalled flower in any one of them. So I could
make a rule, that all circles whatever that exist in this infinite
diagram, obey the same law. I could then say, that is the law. The
Hebrew for law, here we are,the same word, torâh,
means the circle, the rotation. Man has given rise to the idea of law
from the idea of the circle.

Now there
is a geometrical circle there drawn by the compasses and there is
another circle that man has observed, the circle swept out by the
Earth in a year, going round the Sun. True it turns out that it is
slightly ellipsoid but that is because it gets pushed through space
and distorted. But, in principle it is a circle, and the Earth itself
rotates on an axis and describes a circle with any point upon the
Earth. Just the tip of Mount Everest, in sweeping round with the
Earth is drawing a circle through space. So we see here a geometrical
diagram on the paper can be used to represent the orbit of a planet
or the spin of a planet on its own axis. And, we can take the same
diagram and say it represents the spin of an electron round a proton
in an atom, or the spin of electron on its own axis, but everywhere
we go we will find that this rota, this wheel, this turning around a
centre is everywhere the same. So the one universal law is rotation.
Nietzsche built this up into the idea of Eternal Recurrence. The
ancients had already built it up for him some three thousand years
earlier, which he well knew.

What is
being said there, in the Eternal Recurrence is, that if you draw a
circle, it doesn’t matter what you draw it with, if it is
sixty-five thousand miles across or six inches across, the ratio of
the radius to the circumference will be the same. So, one law rules
all form. Now we can call this domination by this law of form, of
rota, the classical mode of philosophy and we can see then that a
philosopher like Plato is very, very interested in truth.

Track 5

Now, if
we remember the field drawn upon with the circle and remember that
each circle apparently, has six petals in it, the Greek for six is
hex so we call it the hexonic field, and we imagine this
hexonic field to be infinitely extended. And we imagine that this
field of hexons is absolutely permeated with circles, all
interlocking in an identical way. There is one law for all the
circles and this law is called The Law, it is called torah, it is
called rot, it is called truth. So that, when Plato is talking about
that truth, or Leibnitz, or Aristotle or Descartes or anybody else,
when they are talking about truth they are really talking about
nothing except a circle which includes finitude, excludes the
Infinite. And if it is to be taken seriously that the true is rigid
and absolute, then if any philosopher tries to conform to the truth,
in his action he will become relatively rigid. There was a school of
philosophers who actually did this. They were called the stoics. And,
having decided that the universe is ruled by truth, logos, then, they
made themselves obey it. So that if a lot of people died and they
knew that death was part of being born, they just said well that is
what happens, if you get born and you die and you remain in perfect
mental balance because you understand the whole process. Now a very
ignorant, emotionally identified person on losing a near and dear one
as they call them, euphemistically, becomes agitated at the thought
of who is going to inherit the money or something like that, and they
forget that they too will die, and they forget this great law of the
cycle, “To the born, certain is death,” as Buddha said. The Stoic
mentality trained itself so that it could actually understand the
inevitability of the recurrence of the truth, the inevitability that
all things are cyclic; and therefore, whatever you have got, you are
going to lose and whatever you lose you will eventually get back
again at some remote point in the cycle of events. So this peculiar
kind of view of reality that reality is fundamentally true meant to
those philosophers, it is our duty to ourselves to make ourselves
true, that is correspondent with that great cycle of events. Now,
this we can call the classical, philosophical view, the elevation of
the true to the highest position.

Now, when
we draw that hexonic field, when we cover infinite space not only as
a plane, but pile them above and below this original one until we
have a three dimensional continuum of circles interlocked in this way
and we call it Infinite Truth, when we have got that firmly fixed in
our minds, then nothing can happen except that when we look into this
mesh of interlocking circles, wecan see patterns, and all the
patterns that exist in this space are called the real, the whole
reality. Plato calls them the real and they are eternal. Now, in
Hindu Philosophy, the same circles are declared to be made by sound.
Now you know that sound is an alternation of compression
decompression, it is little thumps. A little thump, a relax, you
thump, you relax, you thump, you relax. Sound waves are compression
waves and the dot in the centre of the circle is viewed as the point
on which the thump is made and the periphery is the relaxation limit.
So, thump onto the centre, expand to the periphery, thump onto the
centre, and when this type of vibratory process goes on then it is
called the cosmic creative sound and it is conceived to be eternal.
It is eternal because all these vibrations go on simultaneously, and
we contrast eternity with time in a very simple way.

If
I draw a line like that, inertia says I drew it in what you call
time, that is, I started at one end and then went along. And if you
had a watch on you, you could have counted, one two, three, four,
five, six; or some other number according to the speed of your
counting, and you could have said that was the zero point where we
start and there is the first second gone, second, third, fourth,
fifth, like that.

But, we
can also look at that line, now it is drawn without scanning it, that
is to say that without running from one end to the other we can seize
it, grasp it, intuit it, apprehend it, those are all synonyms, with
one look of the eye I see there is a line there. But if I am not
counting it out, time particle after time particle, if I am seeing it
simultaneously, then I am not seeing it temporally, I am seeing it
eternally.

Track 6

Now,
in this theory of the universe, of reality that Plato popularised out
of the mysteries of the temples of Greece; that Pythagoras
popularised out of the mysteries of the temples of the Egyptians, in
that theory, this vibratory field of hexonic forms is eternal and
simultaneous in its vibrational behaviour. It is not serial. And
because it is not serial, that is, coming one after the other, serial
is from teeth, like that on a saw. There is one saw, there’s a saw,
a funny saw with three teeth. If I want to count the teeth, I look at
these tips, one, two, three teeth. Here is the blade of the saw; the
blade of the saw is one blade. By the shape of it I say it is
serrated, that is toothed. When I say I can count serially, that
means to say I can focus my eye on the tips here that have been made
by filing or doing something similar, and focusing on the tips, I can
call each one a tooth tip and then I can serialise, that is tooth,
the way I look at the saw, but the blade itself is whole It is one
piece of metal, it has oneness. It has unity and I am counting these
teeth because I am insisting on focusing on the tips, on the sharp
bits there. But if I look at the back of the saw, here, I would not
have any teeth to count and therefore I would not be serialising and
I would see the plain truth about the saw is that the saw blade is
made of one piece of metal and I would distinguish between the two
ways of looking, the saw as one and the saw as many tooths. And, if I
look at the teeth and start counting them it can take me a long time
but if I look at the whole blade and I examine two or three teeth and
see these teeth have the same depth and the same distance between
them and I take a quick look along the saw and then I measure the
first inch of the saw and count the teeth in that one inch, and then
I measured the length of the blade and multiply that length by the
number of teeth by the number of teeth there were in an inch, then I
know, without counting them all, how many teeth the saw has. And this
way I save time. I spend less time to see the reality of the saw and
how it is made.

Now, all
this probably is very unfeminine and probably not terribly of
interest to the feminine part of the human being. It is the truth, it
is the rigid, it is the cold, it is the undeviating, mysteriously it
is absolutely unalterable. The universe is made in such a way that
its fundamentals cannot be altered. Nobody can do anything about it.
The Son of God in the great religions can do nothing about it. When
power, that is, God the Father, moves, necessarily that power moves
in such a way that it builds up wave forms within it and the totality
of these wave forms adds up to the formal universe, the truth. And,
if power operates at all, it cannot help operating in a manner
conformable to the law of moving power. So there is absolutely no
escape.

Track
7

Now, one
philosopher, Parmenides, thinking about this truth, said the Universe
is a great sphere which is true in its form, utterly unalterable,
there is nothing we can do about it. Now, some philosophers in that
school would say good so we can leave everything as it is as it is
already true, perfect and unalterable. So those at the top level of
Greek aristocratic society were quite happy to believe Pythagoras
knew a bit, quite happy to think Parmenides knew a lot, that Plato
was not too ignorant of this principle that nothing can be changed,
that there is an eternal structure, an eternal true form and that
nothing can be done to alter it, and therefore human society cannot
be altered.

Now, this
idea of the eternally true imposed itself on the human mind and
particularly the aristocratic mind most pressingly, so that they
became practically incapable of thinking in any way other than truly.
True thought was the very essence of their philosophy and conformity
to the truth was their ideal and their purpose, their goal, towards
which they strove, in the case of the great Stoics, to a large
degree, attained that balance of soul that that study of truth gives
you.

But, if
we say, that the idea here is the true, form, the idea in the mind is
form, is truth, then, at the opposite
end of the same body here we have will. Now will is rather funny
because it is power initiating change. Now this raises a very great
problem because according to the doctrine of the truth, the eternal
true, there is no change. The Absolute truthful is unalterable. Pi
ratio rules everywhere. All circles have the same relationship
between their radii and their circumference. All, in all worlds, at
all times in all places, all circles are under the law of pi ratio.
And yet, mysteriously, there is something going on that is not
accounted for and that something is change, and the initiator of the
change we call will. At one end of your body, in the head, you have
an idea; at the other end you have a very mysterious power that seems
to operate independently of ideas and the truth. It acts as we say
conatively, by drive, by impulse to act and behind this impulse there
is initiative, there is that which introduces change and this is
called the Good. The ‘goo’ in good is simply a very primitive
form of will. You know that in French that will would be spelled in
early French like that as in gill, William. The hard G has vanished
off the English word ‘will’ but it used to be there because to
say ‘will’ meant ‘to go.’ You went with, sounds a bit Welsh
that.

Now, the
good meant to will a certain distance, you willed until you stopped
and you were goo-ing along until you decided you had gone far enough
and at that point you stopped and went the letter D, and that was the
‘Goo-d.’ Now these two are exactly opposite concepts. There is
one unalterable law and yet, mysteriously, something appears to be
breaking the law. Now what can it be, because if the law says that
infinite space, three-dimensional, is full of circles, all under the
same law, pi ratio, and these circles cannot move because they are
infinitely extended and the infinitely extended cannot go anywhere
because it is already there, and the infinitely extended form cannot
move, it is absolute and it is rigid. And yet it appears that I can
move my hand through space, and this raises a tremendous problem.
There is the clash to view, the idea is true, the idea is dominant,
only the idea is worth bothering. The idea turns you from an animal
into a human, from a have-not into a have, from a proletarian into a
high-ranking international millionaire type statesman. The idea does
it. And at the other end of the scale there is this tremendous weird
power that disobeyed the law of the idea and this is called the will,
the goo. And it willed a certain distance, and having reached there,
put on the D and it was called ‘The Good.’ Good is willing to a
certain distance, and then stopping.

Now, if
we say the idea is classical we say the will is romantic. We say it
is romantic with reference to the Roman Empire because the Roman
Empire was built by men who were quite irrationable, looking out from
a centre which they had built under the influence of a man who had
just murdered his brother, namely Romulus who killed Remus and he was
determined to make an empire and push out from that centre and keep
pushing until he couldn’t go any further. Then he would draw a big
circle and say, “That is the extent of the Roman Empire.” And
therefore we say ‘romantic’ like the Romans. They just kept
pushing out, pushing out, pushing out until they were stopped. And,
wherever the people that they pushed against were not too strong or
not too well organised they were able to overcome them. When they
came up against very rough types then they stopped and wrote their
letter D. They said this is “good” we have got so far. So the
extent of the Roman Empire at a certain period was quite great simply
because they had irrationally gone out from the centre. Rome was
built with its first inhabitants the rag, tag and bobtail of Italy
invited in to a non-city to build a city. They were invited in to get
in on the ground floor, before the city was built and promised
citizenship if they got in quickly. Having got in they were then
organised and gradually they got recruits until they were able to
start pushing out and build this mysterious empire of will.

Now if we
examine this relation of the idea and the will, or the true and the
good, we find that they are quite antithetic because the idea is
eternally what it is, unalterably what it is and it is, necessarily,
static. Triangles have been triangles for ever in all worlds; circles
remain circles, squares remain squares, in all worlds and for ever.
But the will does not stay where it is by its very, very being, it
transcends its position. It is always pushing out from itself. So if
we say at one end of the body you have a tendency to be a classical
philosopher and to believe in an ultimate true proposition, a truth
that can be attained by the intellect; at the other end of your body
you have a peculiarly urgeful nature which does not believe that the
true is very important at all and it pushes out and continuously
transcends the position it had gone before. And some modern
philosophers have made a little mistake out of this, as some of the
early ones did. They talked about the self transcending itself.

Now if we
draw a circle and say that represents the limit of a being which we
will call a self because it is living in a kind of cell and we talk
about pushing against the wall of the inside using power to extend
that circle, is we then say that the self has transcended itself we
are making a mistake. And it is funny how many philosophers do that.
They talk about the self transcending itself. It doesn’t, itself
can never transcend itself. What it does do is transcend any
definition of itself. In fact we can say that absolute transcendence
is the only non-idolatrous religion. Absolute transcendence of any
form of any definition is non-idolatrous. If we say an idol is a
static zone that can’t do anything precisely because the energy
involved in it is used up in being, not in doing anything
transcendent. Transcend means go across, go beyond what you were.
When you were a little boy or a girl you were so big and then you
grew and became so big, and then you grew and became so big. Each
year you grew, rather like a tree grows, but you never transcended
yourself. What you did was transcended your previous level of
previous development. So, if ever you read, in any literature about
self-transcendence, don’t believe it. You transcend the definition
of the form with which you identified. You cannot transcend yourself;
you can transcend the definition of yourself that you had made at an
earlier stage by making a new definition. So remember the straight
battle, the idea is quite rigid; the will is utterly unrigid, that is
to say it can initiate changes in anything whatever it comes across,
it can always go beyond the definition.

Let us
think about that very carefully, that something in you, an impulsive
nature in your lower tum does things which the reason in your head
tells you are very. Very silly things to do. That thing in the lower
tum will expose you to risk. It puts its foot on the accelerator and
makes you jump the lights, it makes you do all kinds of strange
things like go down a one way street the wrong way. If it feels like
it, it does it. And against all the laws and all the sign posts it
will do such things. And this really does exist; an impulsive power
inside you is every bit as real as your definition of a triangle.
Now, because these two are both present in us, an idea of the truth,
like the circle and pi ratio, and the fact of the impulsive nature
that breaks the idea that transcends it, that jumps beyond it, these
two being co-present in the human being, there arises a situation
where the human being has to choose, at any given moment, whether he
will obey an idea or allow an impulse to operate immediately.

Now, if
we think about immediacy, we mean a kind of action of the will which
is not mediated by thought, something you do without consideration
Energy leaps up from the tum and goes into action it has not
previously examined the form of its action or the consequences. It
does things without counting the cost, and as a matter of fact, in
the romantic literature, the person who does things without counting
the cost is worshipped as the great hero, he dos the most
extraordinary things precisely because of his non-subjection to the
truth, to the idea, to the rigid form. But because these two are
co-presented, there arises in the middle a necessity for choosing
whether to be impulsive or whether to be rational at any given
moment. And this realm of choice is called the beautiful.

There is
beauty and beauty is the realm in which we choose whether to be
impulsive or truthful, whether to be rigid in our application of the
geometrical formula or allow power to operate regardless of the
consequences. And in between this terribly strong driving power and
this totally rigid true idea, is the zone in which feeling operates.
Now by feeling we do not mean emotion. London Emotion is an overspill
of energy when the will is pushed into an idea and the idea cannot
contain it so that it flows out of the idea from the excessive input
of the energy of the will into the idea. That is emotion. But
feeling, in this balancing centre, is not like that at all. Feeling
is the capacity that we have to evaluate the impulse without letting
the impulse overflow, to look at an idea which is rigid without
becoming rigid. So feeling is a very mysterious thing It is a most
mysterious capacity of the human being that he can actually
contemplate rigid truth like pi ratio, logic, mathematics, geometry
and can be equipped with a tremendous driving impulsive power and yet
he is able to balance these and to hold the power that would rush
into activity, and to hold the idea that is absolutely rigid and to
look at both, simultaneously, and then decide from within itself, by
looking at the rigid form of truth and looking at the amount of
impulsiveness, can then decide how much power to operate with what
true form. And this is called beauty. So that all that you call
beauty, in art, in life, springs out of this peculiar centre of
decision, this centre of choice, and the activity of a being is
called beautiful when he can actually balance his will and his idea.

Supposing
you decide you will go to London, suddenly, and you jump up and rush
out and jump into your car, slam it into gear and find that you are
not the first car at the gate but you are in the middle. That would
be an impulsive act. And you would probably have to come back, unless
your car were very powerful, it would not be able to plough its way
through all the other cars in front of it, and you would probably
have to have second thoughts and come back and say, “Would the
people whose cars are number so and so, in front of me, remove their
cars because I am having an impulse.” This is called
self-contradiction ad is called unbeautiful and everybody says,
mentally to their self, “That is a very unbeautiful person.”

Now you
are beautiful in so far as you are able to hold that tremendous power
in you and the idea in you so the rigidity of the idea does not
paralyse you and the impulsiveness of that lower tom energy does not
drive you until you decide. Now how is it that can arise? It is very
interesting because, in the centre of this chest here we have a heart
most people have it slightly to the left which shows how busily
cunning they have become, few people have it on the right, which
shows foolishly non-conformist they are, very few have it central,
but the idea of having it slightly biased to the left for civilised
human beings is to give a little more importance to the idea than to
the impulse. And the reason for that evolutionarily, is because to
align the impulse to operate without the idea, many people have been
killed rather early in life and it has given the rise to the idea
that to think a little before you leap is not so bad for survival
purposes. Hence the slight lean of the heart to the left. Left means
thinking.

Now, in
this act of beauty, the fact that it is possible to do it, the fact
there is a thing called good taste in art, the fact that some dancer
in the ballet can actually do exactly the right gesture to convey
something in relation to certain music. He makes the gesture
congruent with the music, and in that congruence he is said to have
good taste. He does not do it too much or too little he does it just
right. He has good taste. So the funny thing about beauty is beauty
is to do with taste. You might think that was very funny until you
lost your sense of smell, through a bad cold, and discovered that
your sense of smell is largely a sense of background for taste. When
you taste a thing, you are really smelling it. When you put it in
your mouth and you loosen the particles of food then the little
particles that are loosed, rise up and they are smelled, going up at
the back of the mouth, you smell them and most of what you call taste
is smell. And, because of this, if you put a couple of nose holes up
there and draw them down to make lungs, you can see how the sense of
smell is connected with the chest, and that your good taste is
mostly, smell.

Now,
think about this very carefully, only if you are able to balance the
impulse and the rigid idea, before you act, can you do a beautiful
act. But if you can do this, it shows a relation somewhere between
these two poles and how can we arrive at this relation if the idea
were absolutely separate, like certain philosophers have thought, if
the idea is paramount, if the idea is the ultimate truth, if there is
nothing other than ultimately the truth, then there is no will, will
is an illusion, an erroneous attitude towards existence. But, on the
other hand if the wilful beings say I don’t believe in ideas, they
are rubbish, rather like the Norman barons did, if they say the idea
is just an invention of wicked priests to try to curb my will, they
also are in a peculiar position because they are isolated in the will
from the idea. So that, when they operate impulsively, they cannot
operate in a direction because the essence of a direction is an idea,
that is, a form. If you go North or South or East or West you have a
compass, you have a form, you bisect angles. So, whether the person
is stressed on the idea or on the will, if he insists that that only
is ultimate and not the other, he is automatically wrong. So neither
the idea nor the will can be ultimate and therefore we have to find
another ultimate.

When the
feeling operates between the will and the idea it demonstrates a
peculiar thing that originally there was a field of energy and this
field of energy is the origin of our feeling. Field and feeling are
related. What you feel when you feel yourself to be is the energy
occupying the zone of your being. And the centre of this feeling is
the heart. And this feeling has polarised itself and devoted one end
of itself to action, pushing, the other end of itself to thinking.
So, instead of having a duality of two utterly alien forces, one
called will and one called idea, and never the twain shall meet, you
have that the idea and the will are polarisations of feeling. Now
this lifts feeling up to a very high level but we are not talking
about emotion as overspill. Now the classical philosophers have been
suspicious of feeling because they were confused between feeling and
emotion. And the wilful philosophers have been suspicious of feeling
because they say it gives rise to compassion and if you have
compassion you might not be able to jump impulsively on somebody’s
head and smash the skull in. So if you wanted to be a great empire
builder, from the will, like a Roman in the ancient world, you
couldn’t afford to feel because if you were putting thousands and
thousands of people to death because you wish to take over their
territory to extend your empire you couldn’t afford to feel, you
couldn’t afford to have compassion, that means suffering with them
in their feeling. So you deny it.

So we
have two kinds of philosophies, a philosophy of idea that recommends
it that we believe truth is ultimate and a philosophy of will that
says will is ultimate. Nietzsche is an example of the will philosophy
and Hegel of the idea philosophy and both of those philosophers
condemn feeling and say that anybody who feels cannot be a
philosopher by definition, either because a feeler is not wilful or a
feeler is not a geometrician. They suspect the feeling because of a
simple fact about it; feeling has no edges of itself. That is to say,
feeling is infinitely extended. Feeling is the infinite field of
power of the universe and prior to polarisation, that is the division
into wilful end and formal end, there is nothing other than this
field of power, and what it is feeling is nothing but the internal
undulation of its own being. When it bends a little it becomes aware
of the bend. It bends a bit this way and then it bends a bit this
way, and it bends a bit this way, it undulates in itself, this
feeling arises in its undulation is the ground of its self-awareness,
so that all self-awareness of all beings, wherever they may be, no
matter how low or high in the philosophical scale, is based on
feeling. So, the Latin word from which we derive the word sentience
means to feel, primarily and secondarily, to know. That when we feel,
if I feel the pressure of this thing on the Perspex I tell how much
friction there is in it, I am feeling it, I can feel the drag on it
according to the pressure I put upon it And feeling is very peculiar
because it allows me to think and to will. Now willing does not allow
me to think, thinking doesn’t allow me to will but feeling allows
me to will and to think. So feeling is a very mysterious power. It is
a power that knows itself and can do two opposites. It can make
itself absolutely rigid in triangles and squares, circles and so on
or, it can move about without mentioning them. It can move about in a
wriggly way like this, without making an enclosure or it can move
around making circles, it can enclose squares and triangles. Feeling
can do all these things and therefore feeling is really the source of
willing and thinking. So the philosophers of thinking and the
philosophers of willing are both at fault because they think that
their particular view is prior to the opposite view, and both say
that feeling itself is too indeterminate, too ill-defined to be worth
bothering with. And there are many philosophers who have discounted
any person who trying to think, started to allow that there was a
thing like feeling. We have had philosophers who were doing very
well in their rational process and then they suddenly started to
think about feeling and allowed that feeling had a function, and the
moment that had happened then the philosophers of the idea, the
classical philosophers said, “Oh he has stopped being a philosopher
now. He has started going funny and artistical and mystical.” And
the volitionists had said, “He has stopped being a philosopher now
because he is balancing himself instead of doing things.”

Now, can
there be a philosophy of feeling, a feeling philosophy? The answer is
Yes, but we haven’t seen it fully developed in history precisely it
doesn’t bounce people about and therefore it doesn’t build
empires and it isn’t rigidly defining situations therefore it
doesn’t build philosophies, and there are few greats in the history
of the human race, the great thinkers and the great world builders.
The great world builders who make the empires, the great thinkers who
give a rationale of making that empire, and these few
greats have put out of court feeling which is actually their own
origin. And when you feel inside that hexonic field, inside this
field here, you see that you can focus on this circle and see a
process there in which you may settle, of you could shift your
attention from there to there
and do the same thing here couldn’t you. You can do it wherever you
like in infinite space. You can start doing the same thing over here
again, we can just do exactly the same thing, and yet another. Now
observe, that when we shift consciousness we do not shift above it.
If I look at this circle, and then at this circle, and then at this
circle, I am not shifting anything other than what is called
attention. True that my eyeball, if the picture is large, will roll
along while I am looking at it, from side to side, but the movement
of my eyeball doesn’t cause the shift of my attention, but the
shift of my attention is followed by the movement of the eyeballs. I
am aware of a periphery around the circle, I am aware of space beyond
the circle. I can see this lamp shining here, peripherally, but I can
see the space beyond it, my awareness includes awareness of space,
and space is infinite, therefore my awareness is infinite, therefore
I can be aware there is a person sitting here and another person
sitting next to him, and then I can say, I will now focus, turn the
eye onto Peter, turn my eye onto Claire, turn my eye onto Doctor
Wadsworth, onto Barbara Wadsworth and so on. I am shifting my eye
along, my physical eye, after I have shifted my attention. So, a
peculiar thing, this field, which is infinitely extended and cannot
go anywhere and therefore in which movement is totally impossible is
incapable of stopping me shift my attention. So this absolutely rigid
field of form that we call the Hexonic field does not immobilise
consciousness. The consciousness itself, infinitely extended, by its
intention has created this hexonic field. By its focus, it has made
these circles throughout infinity, and by a simple shift of focus
intention in itself it gives rise to what it calls ‘movement.’
Really the whole of space is full absolutely of those circles which
are little vibratory pressures and relaxations, alternating. And when
I look at you all, I can shift my attention from this side to this
side and make my eyeball follow so that I focus my attention on my
friend John Coop, and I focus on that girl with the hairdo called
Peg, and Abel behind writing a note, I see Hannah Rigg, up there at
the back, and I saw her while I was looking at John. I mentioned her
later but I saw her and I am aware of her presence simultaneously.
Now, if we talk about this carefully, I am aware of John’s
presence, I am aware of Hannah’s presence, I am aware of Herbie’s
presence, I am aware of Bernard’s presence and so on, all these
presences are pi-ra-essences, a presenceis a pi
ratio essence. That is, it is in this hexonic field there is a
circle called Bernard Lawrence. There is another one called Herbie
Hunter, there is one called John Coop and each of these circles has
its name and its form. Think about it very carefully. All of these
circles co-exist in absolute simultaneity, they are all co-present
and the supreme presence of presences is that which comprises all our
little circles in itself and itself is watching, that is it is aware
of the feelings of tension inside itself, each little tension zone
constituting an individual like Bernard or Hannah and so on

Consider
what that means. It means that in the realm of the eidetic no form
ever moves but the intention moves in the consciousness. The form
can’t move because it is already infinitely extended. Being
infinitely extended it can’t go anywhere because it is already
there, but the consciousness can focus in point A, point B, point C
and so on. So by a simple shift of consciousness there is apparently
a movement of bodies. Think of the implications of that and let us go
back to our trine again. The true is this form absolutely
unchangeable, in the hexonic field. The good is the amount of energy
we put in our intention to focus, the amount of energy of intention
to focus. Focus is fo-cus that means force-strike. A blow
struck by an energy is called a focus, and this focus is
consciousness. Consciousness as a mysterious power able to converse,
able to bring itself down to one of those hexonic circles. It can do
this, it has created these hexons in this way by this weird inherent
power of self focus. A very ancient magical word was fohat,
FOHAT. It meant the equivalent of ‘let there be.’ Fohat, that is
to say, take the force and fix it in opposition, then nail the
opposing forces.

Power,
form, assessment in feelings. Consider this very carefully. It means
that any single person here can interfere with its own state and
because all these circles are intermeshed it can interfere with the
state of any other circle within the infinite field. You can change
your mood and interfere with the mood of the person next to you. You
could alter your breathing rate and thy will become aware, at first
unconsciously then consciously that you are breathing differently. It
is not uncommon for wives to say in the middle of the night, to
husbands, “Why are you breathing like that? You are doing
something, what are you doing? You are interested in something other
than me. Where are you?” They are very, very aware of these changes
in rhythm even in the breathing. Now male minds think, “Oh well,
she just noticed that my breathing was different so I will control my
breathing.” But the moment he controls his breathing, she becomes
aware that he is controlling his breathing and she says, “Why are
you controlling your breathing?” True? There are one or two heads
recognise it. So there is really no escape for the male mind because
the moment it becomes aware that it is under observation from feeling
and it makes an adjustment to protect itself from this invasion of
feeling, the feeling being that owns him says, “Why are you
controlling yourself? Don’t you wish to be read don’t, you wish
to be felt and examined by intuitive feeling?” There is no escape.
There is no escape because this feeling is the field of reality. You
cannot insulate yourself from feeling. You follow this in electronic
theory, you cannot insulate from a field. You can insulate a wire
sufficiently to let an electronic current a running row of electrons
go down it, and you can, by insulating materials of rubber and
plastic and so on, make it stay in the wire but you cannot a field
appearing round it out side the rubber. Confining a field is
absolutely impossible. You can relatively force them, by electronic
trickery and magnetism, to narrow themselves slightly but you cannot
eliminate their capacity for transcending the limitations of the
insulating material.

So, we
can say that feeling itself is already transcendent. Think of that
very carefully. If instead of thinking, you fellows, if you start
feeling just feel around you instead of thinking, you become aware of
other beings. Now, if you think carefully about your favourite idea,
you can forget that there are any other beings in the world. You can
forget so much that you can actually go out and enjoy yourself and
then, about eleven thirty, remember that you were married. It can
actually happen. I’ve known it happen, it is not just a joke. True
he was only married three months but it is possible to focus on your
favourite idea so strongly that you don’t know anything else
exists. But the moment you start feeling, you do know that there are
other feelings, there are other beings and that they don’t feel
identical with yourself. So the feeling is essentially, transcendent.
Feeling transcends in two directions. It transcends any idea you care
to formulate because every idea is representable by a circle which
includes and excludes and it transcends in the direction of the will
because in order to will you have to converge and bring yourself
towards a point progressively, like that, if you are going along and
that convergence renews awareness of what is going on around you. So
feeling transcends the will and feeling transcends the idea.

We feel
the two kinds of greats, the great thinkers, the Hegels, the
Spinozas, the Platos, or we read the history of the human race what
do we find? A chapter called Great Thinkers, and another one called,
Great Empire Builders, and only when as people become more and more
sensitive, do they have a section called Great Artists who feel, but
they are considered as a sort of decoration for the empire builders
and the thinkers. But, in fact, that which they consider to be a mere
decoration is the source of the empire builder’s energy and of the
form of the philosophy builder. So the feeling is absolute, feeling
is transcendent and feeling is the only non-idolatrous thing we have
got. An idea, pinning down in an act of identification, tying your
feeling down into identification, that idea is an idol. An impulse of
will making your body do something is likewise an idol, an idol of
power. You have two kinds of idols, idols of power and idols of
truth; idols of empire builders, idols of philosophy builders. But
the feeling can break identification, and when it does so there is a
total transcendence of the idea, of the philosophy, and of the will,
of the empire. S that any proposition whatever, in any period of
history can be transcended by feeling and this pre-occupation with
the examination of feeling is only just beginning to appear in the
human race as a serious matter for consideration by philosophers, by
scientists and even by empire builders.

We must
become conscious of our feeling transcending the idea. When we get an
idea, we must feel around the idea, we must feel how other people
react to this idea. We must feel how it affects the impulse to act in
ourselves and other people and in this feeling assessment is this
secret, so that if you ask yourself which is it best to be, what is
the automatic thing? If you w ere told that truth, beauty and
goodness were separable and you had to choose which of the three you
would choose, which of the three would it be? Any offers?

Well the
more intelligent you are the more you will say “Beauty.” If you
are impulsive you might say, “Good, will.” If you are a bit rigid
in the intellect, you might say, “True.” But if you are merely
true you would be rigid and dead and if you are merely wilful you
would not be in any one place for two seconds together and you would
have no formal awareness of what you were doing and you would just be
a continuously travelling vectoring energy going nowhere in
particular. So the beauty, which balances these two processes, is the
ultimate reality from which we derive and the ultimate goal towards
which we are going.

Now,
there is a very ancient saying, which says you can never gain
something which you have already got. And some people have been very
frightened by this and said, well I haven’t got much money, that
means I can never gain it, or I haven’t got much sense, that means
I can never gain it. What it actually means is, you are already in
full possession of infinite sentience, infinite sensitivity, infinite
beauty. You are already in full possession, but you have made a
little mistake of thought or will. Either you have conceived yourself
in thought to be finite, to be limited, or you have impulsively
operated as if you are an independent being. Two ways of falling,
falling to idea in which you believe you are separate or separable
from other beings, and the falling from will in which you impulsively
do something. And both of those falls are a fall out of the
transcendence of feeling. Imagine an infinite field of power extended
in all directions and imagine this power perfectly balanced, and
imagine this power, it its perfect balance is perfectly reflexive in
its own state. Nothing can disturb it, it knows itself, absolutely.
Imagine this power has the power by its own focus, to bring a circle
into being and imagine it produces a circle inside itself, a sphere,
and it posits this inside its consciousness. That is fine. But,
supposing, having posited this sphere and started it rolling, it
becomes interested in the rolling sphere and becomes fascinated by
it. Fascinated means bound, bound by its own object. It has made a
sphere. I have looked into this sphere I have made. I wonder what is
inside it? I will go in and I will have a look. Now, if it remembers
that it made the sphere around a zone of nothing except pure
sentience, it wouldn’t have to go in would it? Because it would
know what it would find, itself. It has posited a sphere inside
itself and been delighted with this sphere has lit itself in its
consciousness and this sphere is an original glowing in original
house. And then it goes inside the house and it looks at the walls of
the sphere and it becomes very interested in the sphere. It becomes
so interested, it puts so much energy inside that sphere, examining
the walls of the sphere, that it forgets that there is an outside to
the sphere. It sounds silly, doesn’t it, to do a thing like that?
But that is precisely what the human soul has done. Here we are, down
on Earth, and what do we look at? In the night skies we join hands
with the famous son and the infamous woman of Solomon and we look
into the sky and we are looking at the inside of this sphere. What do
we see? Stars, funny lights. We are so delighted with them we spend
thousands of years drawing them and making maps of them and observing
that they seem to go round a centre and we actually keep little time
counts of them. Do you know that one of those lights has a
periodicity of five hundred and fifty million light years. Isn’t it
interesting! You get a touch of the Patrick Moores you see.

Now, you
sit inside your sphere on Earth and you start counting these blasted
things, and then you think, I wonder what I am? I must invent a name
for them. I know, I started counting those bright things; I’ll call
them stars. And so they were called stars, and the totality of them
were called Astarte and they said, we don’t want anybody to know
about this so we will have a secret code and we will pretend there is
a goddess called Astarte and we will pretend we are worshipping her
so that when people find us walking about at night like this, instead
of saying you are crackers looking at those lights, they will say
they are worshippers of Astarte. True we keep falling down wells
while we are doing it, but we have a contract with each other to drag
each other out of the well. Thus began Astarte worship.

Now, from
that lovely beginning, we go on studying things. You keep that one
going, you know. But we also study things a bit nearer, like the
Solar System and the planets and then we start studying other things
on Earth. Anything whatever will do, the back leg of a frog,
forty-volume introduction, the important thing is to be interested in
what is going on inside this great sphere.

Now the
peculiar thing, interest is energy input. And when you put energy
into a thing, you say it is goo-d. You decide that you will study
donkeys so you set yourself a definite amount of energy to do it and
you build yourself a promise, with a Nobel Prize at the end of it,
you are a specialist in donkeys, you are going to write and absolute
authoritative book on the donkey. It will be very fat and full of
plates of all kinds including foldout figures. For this, you get a
prize. And because of this, there is a tremendous accumulation of the
inside of this great sphere called knowledge and people are
absolutely astounded by it. They go into the library, they see rows
and rows of books and they think all these books are full of
knowledge and I haven’t read them all. Oh me, Oh my, now if
somebody tests me suddenly, “How many hairs on the nose of a donkey
and I can’t reply, I am going to feel a perfect fool. So I must
start reading this fat volume of donkey law. And there is a
conspiracy on the part of publishers and writers of fat books, to
encourage this idea. And the great Gnostics of the early Christian
years got into trouble for exposing this trick and they said, “You
know that great sphere that you talk about and that some people have
declared to be God and you have to bend the knee to it and obey it?
It is really a great big jailer, an arcon whose sole job there is to
keep you fascinated inside the sphere, to keep it going, to keep the
interest going. Meanwhile, on the outside of that same sphere, there
is one eternal, infinitely spreading smile. All it does outside there
is smile, to think about what is going on inside that circle.

Now, we
could never get out if ever we were in. This is very, very important.
You can never get out if ever you were in. You never were in this
sphere. The sphere has always been inside consciousness and this
consciousness you are. In the equation aham brahman, I am this
extension. I have never been locked up. True, I was told I should be
locked up, by my educators. I have tried to believe it. I have done O
levels and A levels, BAs, MAs, PhDs, you name it I have done it but I
never could believe it. I tried to be good, as Luxembourg says, in
closing down, because I know that I should, but I can’t believe it.
Now this is the peculiar thing about the human race. It has tried and
does try to believe things it doesn’t believe. Haven’t you tried
to believe in God, at some time in your life, sitting on a cloud up
there? When you have got a bit wiser haven’t you swapped it and
said it is not really on a cloud up there it is a sort of universal
intelligent power. You have done your best haven’t you but you
don’t believe it. You can’t believe it, if you try to believe it
you become what is called, confused because if you try to do
something you can’t do you have what is called double presentation,
the thing that you are supposed to believe in and the fact that you
can’t believe it, double presentation, that is confusion. You never
were identified fully with your physical body were you? Were you
Herbie?

No.

Did your
consciousness ever get down to the body so that you thought and felt
that you were only extended unto that skin and that you had no rights
beyond it?

No.

Otherwise
you would not have got married would you? Even marriage is a kind of
transcendence isn’t it of the measly differents of your skin
surface? You have always known this haven’t you? Everybody has ever
known that they have never been fully identified with the physical
organism. They have tried to be to please Mummy and Daddy, or
schoolteachers, or university professors. Even monarchs, they have
tried to believe what they cannot believe because the reality that
you cannot get rid of is the infinity of your feeling sensitivity.
Thank you. That must mean time to have a drink. Is that right?